Men and Angels (29 page)

“Well, I saw the light on in your study and I knew you were still up, so I thought I’d just stop in and talk to you about finishing the job.”

“Oh, then, you’ll be finished soon,” Anne said with disappointment.

“Well, if I go on doing it in dribs and drabs like I have, it’ll take a lot longer than it should.”

“That’s good,” Anne said. “I mean, it’s fine with me if you want to come late at night as you did before. Can you have tea now?”

“Sure, if I’m not disturbing you.”

“Oh, no, I just finished typing a silly letter. I have to go to Dallas next week. Isn’t that awful?”

“Gee, I’d love to go. See what everybody’s talking about. That’s where the money is these days, you know, the Sunbelt.”

“Whenever I hear ‘the Sunbelt’ I imagine all those businessmen wearing belts made up of gold suns. Or some kind of god like Orion wearing the sun for a belt.”

“Orion, that’s the first constellation I showed my kids. Before the Big Dipper even. That’s what I would’ve loved to’ve been. An astronomer. What would you’ve liked to have been?”

“I’m doing what I want to do. I just hope I’ll be able to go on doing it.”

“Bad times,” he said. “My wife wanted to be an artist. She used to paint before she got sick. But she still likes to look at art books. Andrew Wyeth is the one she loved. She loves to look at this Andrew Wyeth book she bought downtown. Do you like Andrew Wyeth?”

“Some things,” she lied.

“My wife’s got this thing she really wants to do. You know that painting of his,
Christina’s World?
Of the crippled girl.”

“Yes.”

“Well, she wants to find that hill, the place where he painted it, and she wants me to take her down there and then take her picture posing like that girl Christina.”

“Oh,” Anne said. Rather desperately, she began pouring tea.

“I think it’s a bad idea. I mean, the guy painted the picture once. That’s enough. I don’t see why my wife wants to do it. But we’ll probably go this summer.”

You see, she said to herself, he really is a person whose instincts are fine. He understands about art, about the primacy of the image. He just hasn’t had the chance to get an education. Perhaps he could go to night school, take courses part time at the college. He clearly has a good mind; it would be a shame if he didn’t get to cultivate it.

“How is your wife?” she asked guiltily.

“She was real bad around Christmas, upset. So we had to be kind of quiet, you know. But she’s good right now. I told her about you. She’d really like to meet you. I told her you had all these art books, and she said she’d really like to come over and look at them sometime. I told her maybe you could lend her some.”

“Of course,” said Anne. “She’s welcome anytime.”

“I told her that,” Ed said, smiling rather brilliantly. “I told her you were that kind of person.”

“Well, I’ll let you go now,” he said, putting on his hat and jacket. At the door, he kissed her on the cheek. “It’s great to see you,” he said.

“Great to see
you
,” she said, squeezing his hand.

As she closed the door she heard Laura coming into the living room. She turned to her sharply.

“Ed said he left several messages. You never gave them to me.”

“They must have slipped my mind,” Laura said.

“If any messages come, will you please make sure I get them,” Anne said, without the edge she would have liked.

“Of course, Anne,” Laura said, looking into Anne’s eyes.

She could see that Laura was suspicious. It was dreadful, really, how people couldn’t imagine that a man and a woman would be simply friends. Perhaps that was what had happened to Michael, perhaps his relations with Charlotte Mistière were no less innocent than hers and Ed’s.

She and Barbara made a date to see a documentary about women in the labor movement of the thirties. The faces of old women appeared in the darkness. Plain faces, working faces. Caroline would not have looked like that, she thought. The women spoke of the work they had done, terrible work, arduous and dangerous: they worked in slaughterhouses where people regularly lost limbs and fingers, they worked in laundries twelve hours a day. They made her think of Ed, who worked hard and was gallant. She turned her mind back to the movie. “None of the people really involved in the movement had children,” one of the women was saying. “They’d been too busy and, besides, it was too dangerous.”

As they talked about leaflets and picketing, jumping on chairs in rooms where the workers did not stop their sewing machines as they listened, for fear of attracting the attention of the bosses, Anne thought of these women who in their old age could look back with pride on youthful acts of courage. Public acts that brought a public danger. She would never have that. What would she have to look back on when she was old? Furniture, a house, grandchildren whom she never saw? Some work, if she was lucky. But nothing she had had to risk much for. Like most women, she would not have had the experience of facing down an enemy. Most women faced their enemies in darkness, certain they would lose. But the women in this movie stood on chairs, on platforms, they raised their fists at the raised fists of bullies, they shouted down the voices that said they would starve, would die in jail, would never work again. They had been afraid for their lives but had stood fighting. They had not had children.

Afterwards she and Barbara went for a drink.

“What do you think having children does to your moral life?” she asked her.

“What moral life?” Barbara said. “I’m the Neville Chamberlain of the moral life. My moral life consists of appeasing the gods. ‘I love little Pussy, his coat is so warm, and if I don’t hurt him, he’ll do me no harm.’ That’s my moral life since I’ve had kids.”

“Was everybody always like that? Mothers, I mean.”

“How would we know? Nobody ever asked them.”

“I look at these women of Caroline’s generation, and they seem so courageous compared to us. All of us huddling by our little hearths.”

“Well, they were also very naïve.”

“It breaks your heart to think about what faith people had in the Russian Revolution. Caroline’s friends in the twenties, they thought they’d found heaven on earth.”

“They still had the luxury of believing in such a thing. You know, I used to think a lot about that woman, Kathy Boudin. The one who was a Weatherwoman, who robbed the armored car and killed the driver. She had a kid. I could never figure it out. I admired her, though, to believe in some outside thing enough to put her kid at risk. But then sometimes I just felt like slamming her for being irresponsible.”

“It’s what I always feel about Caroline. Sometimes I want to slam her for being a bad mother, then sometimes I think it didn’t matter, she was a great painter, so what was the difference.”

“Nobody gives a shit if Monet was a bad father.”

“I know. It isn’t fair.”

“Maybe I’ll have a moral life when I get older. When my kids are gone. But by then I’ll be too tired. Or scared for myself, instead of them. Maybe it’s just myself I’m scared for anyway and I use them as an excuse.”

“It must be possible to have children and be decent.”

“No,” said Barbara. “When you’re a mother, you think with your claws.”

She left the house with everybody in it still asleep. It was adventurous and yet luxurious for her to do this, to leave behind a sleeping house. She was alone and purposeful in the unlit morning: she would fly to Washington to see the paintings of Caroline’s that were in the Eastman Collection. The Eastmans owned a dozen small Bonnards, six Vuillards, a large Gauguin, as well as works of their American contemporaries: Dove, Marin, O’Keeffe. Eastman had lived abroad as a young man; his money had come to him, flowed to him, from one of those solid unnameable sources of American capital that has, like some beneficent embodied deity, no beginning and no end. At fifty he married his mistress of twenty years. They moved back to his home in Washington, and for the next thirty-five years devoted themselves to each other and to their collection.

Jane had described Ted Eastman to her. A dreamy look had come over Jane, a look that told Anne that democracy would never touch Jane’s deepest heart, as she said, “Ah, he was a gentleman. Caroline adored him. He was terribly smart, of course, and they were terribly flirtatious with one another. You can tell that by their letters. I love this one,” Jane had said, reading one Ted Eastman had sent Anne. When he corresponded with Anne, he’d sent her copies of all the letters he’d had from Caroline.

Dear Dr. Princeton:

So you liked my show, not that your taste is entirely trustworthy. Imagine seeing anything in Mr. Klee. For me, a show is only an agony. One sneaks restlessly from room to room, looking furtively to the right and the left, with the bad conscience of a criminal. And finally, the shock! One meets up, face-to-face, with one’s own offspring—and immediately runs away, if only to avoid being discovered and pursued. At this show, which gave
you
, you say, such pleasure, I began by looking at the pictures on the first wall very calmly. Then I saw the one of the little Hungarian girl with the wild roses… and I ran away. Quite out of breath—the image, do agree, is risible—I panted into a cafe and ate three pastries. Then I took up with life. So when are you leaving Grace for me? I’ve spoken to her; she’s a generous girl, she says she’ll give me you for ten years, or at least an equal share. Anyway, she’s much too good for you. I’ve a feeling no one would say that about me in relation to anyone. Except, perhaps, for Herbert Hoover. When are you coming to supper? I may even allow you a glimpse of the glorious Jane. High-minded, aren’t I?

Anne had a letter from Ted Eastman dated July thirtieth; now he was dead. He had developed leukemia and died, after only three weeks in the hospital.

She felt queer visiting his widow, who was said to be grieving deeply. “I don’t envy you seeing Grace,” Jane had said. “I should think this is the end for her. She’ll probably go dotty.” And now, Anne thought, she had to walk into the room of a stranger, bearing a letter in the hand of the beloved dead. She knew how she felt seeing Michael’s handwriting when he was away from her; it made his body come to life. Even more than his clothes, it could make her miss his absent body with a sharp, surprising pang. And what would this letter make this wife feel, this woman who would never again see the man she had lived beside for nearly sixty years?

She was shown into the library of the large house. When the door closed, she could hear the heels of the Jamaican servant on the green marble floors outside. The door of the library opened silently, and a small old woman appeared dressed in a shapeless tweed skirt and thin olive-green sweater. At first Anne thought she must be a servant, but then she realized no servant would be tolerated if she dressed so badly. No servant could come to work in brown felt slippers ripped in twenty places; no servant’s hair—thin, uncombed, unwashed—could speak so clearly her distress. The sorrow of a paid retainer would have had to be far more concealed; no one who worked for wages would have been allowed so boldly to embody grief.

“I’m Grace Eastman,” the woman said. “You must be Mrs. Foster. Would you like to look at the paintings? Yes, of course you would, that’s why you’ve come. All the way from Massachusetts. But you’d like a cup of tea, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. My husband always gave people who came to look at the paintings something to drink. But then you never met my husband.”

“No,” said Anne, “although I had a letter from him.”

“Yes, I know you did. We did everything together. Everything.”

“It must be a great grief to you,” Anne said. She kept getting glimpses of the pink cotton straps of Mrs. Eastman’s bra and slip through the cigarette burns that were dotted across her sweater like buckshot.

“Are you married, Mrs. Foster? Of course you are, you’re a Mrs. But are you still married? So many people aren’t nowadays.”

“Yes, I’m still married. My husband’s a professor at Selby College.”

“I know people who went to Selby. All of them are dead. My husband was a Princeton man. I went to Oberlin. I was a social worker. In a settlement house. That’s where I met my husband. He was helping me raise money. Of course I gave it all up to marry him. We lived abroad.”

“Jane Watson has told me about you. She revered your husband.”

“Everyone did. There was no one like him.”

“What an exciting life you had. You’ve known many of the marvelous people of the century.”

“Yes, but they’re all dead now. There are no more marvelous people.”

Anne laughed. “I sometimes agree with you.”

Grace Eastman looked at her oddly, as if she had spoken nonsense. “My husband was a great man. But he died a terrible death. An ignominious death. I saw everything.”

She began to wring her hands. “He had leukemia, at least that’s what they said. He stopped making red blood cells. The oxygen stopped going to his brain, so he lost his mind. I was there when it happened. He looked at me terribly. Then he said, ‘I have no more ideas.’ That was when he lost control. He began swearing and thrashing about. He had to be put under restraints. He befouled his bed. Then he shouted, ‘There is no justice.’”

The woman began crying. Anne didn’t think Grace Eastman remembered she was there.

“What do you think he meant by that ‘There is no justice’? Do you think he meant it in the universal sense? Or do you think he was referring to his own case?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Eastman. I didn’t know your husband.”

“No, of course you didn’t,” she said. Clearly she’d lost interest in Anne. “You can have any of the pictures you want. My secretary will make the arrangements.”

She walked out the back door of the library as the servant entered with a teapot, plates, cups, saucers and a dish of cookies on a silver tray.

On the plane, Anne’s mind lurched between the paintings of Caroline’s that could be included in the show now and thoughts of Ted Eastman, who had chosen and owned them, dying as he did, strapped to his bed, crying out against a cruel fate. Suppose that it was true, that all one valued—love, perception, virtue—was a trick of the blood? There was no supposing about it. It was the case. She remembered the woman she had met once at a party whose story she’d found horrible. The woman had had a ski accident; she had hit her head on a tree. After she recovered, she lost her senses of smell and taste. But she also lost what she called the reflex of affection. “I would see my husband and my children,” she said, “and I would say to myself, ‘Here are my husband and my children, they are people I love. But I feel nothing for them.’” This went on for a year, until the woman’s sense of smell came back and then her taste. Only after those returned could she feel anything for her family.